She laughed in peals of pink, her head tilted back slightly. “You’re hopeless, you know.” She was being good-humored, he could tell, but she wasn’t far off. He had to admit he was pretty hopeless. “Have you seriously never been to the park before?” 

“I don’t see why I should.” He scanned the landscape, taking in the blades of gray grass. “There’s nothing here.” Shaking her head in amused disbelief, she grasped his hand before he could have a chance to react and ushered him to a different location. 

“Come look at this.” She knelt down before a round surface, and he could tell by the almost imperceptible ripples that it was water, maybe a lake. “Be careful not to fall in.” He rolled his eyes, biting back a sarcastic remark in response to how she was babying him; they had only just met and he didn’t want to chase her off. He watched blankly as she dipped her hand into the water and noticed how the water seemed to pulse away from her fingers. She turned toward him and expected him to do the same, but when her eyes met with his stony countenance she emitted an exaggerated sigh and reached for his hand once again, lowering it into the water. 

He jerked his hand back, caught off guard by the coldness of the water. “What are you doing?” She didn’t answer, but instead scrabbled about on the floor, searching for something. Finally, she sat upright, clutching something in her hand: something flat and smooth and he noticed how it fit perfectly into her palm as she presented it to him. 

“When I was little I used to skip rocks all the time. My mom would always yell at me for not studying and doing important things,” she recalled with a chuckle, getting up to her feet and repositioned herself into a throwing stance, pushing the sleeves of her blue sweater up. “Watch.” She tossed the rock at the surface and, much to his astonishment, it bounced across the lake several times before sinking. 

“How did you do that?” 

“Let me teach you.” She gently moved him so that he was in an ideal position for skipping rocks. “And just flick your wrist a little.” 

On his first attempt he failed, and she laughed her pink laughter on cue. Only when he frowned at her did she stop. A couple of tries later, each ending in failure, he was starting to get frustrated. “This is ridiculous.” He was down to his last rock, and he pitched it. 

One, two. 

His jaw dropped open as he succeeded on his final try. She seemed really excited for him, and he felt as if some of that excitement rubbed off on him. The corners of his mouth curved upward. “I told you I could do it.” 

“Don’t get all smug just because you did it once.” 

He, in fact, did take the opportunity to be smug. Sweeping his gaze over the lake once more, he realized something. Just now, right before the rock sank to the bottom of the lake, he had seen something. It had been only for a split second, but he was sure that he had seen something. 

He had seen blue.